The Online Photographer

Why a 28?

[Con't. from the last post]

...So anyway, speaking of my abnormal fondness for primes over zooms and my healthy but not norm...er, average brain, I think I owe some of you an explanation. Or at least that small subset of you who might be curious. If you're not one of those, you have my permission to skip this.

You might have noticed that I've been gassing on since forever about liking 35mm lenses, yet I bought a 28mm for my latest camera.

What?

Here's the reason.

'Kay. You start out with the 24x36mm sensor and 36 million pixels. The D800 has a "DX Mode," meaning you can set the sensor manually to capture FX (full frame) or DX (APS-C), or you can set it to auto-detect and it will switch to DX mode when you mount a DX lens. In DX mode, the 28mm ƒ/1.8G is a 42mm-equivalent lens. And on the D800, even in DX mode you still have 15MP. Which is plenty for smaller prints—say on 13x19" paper. Which is all I'm planning to make.

Meaning, if I shoot with a 28mm and crop substantially, but not all the way to DX, somewhere in there is the same angle of view as a 35mm lens. Example:

Picture of Lulu from the other day...

...And the whole frame as shot.

I suspect I've cropped this one in even a little past 35mm field-of-view (FoV).

For many years, I printed 35mm "full frame," all the way out to the film edge. (That's what "full frame" used to mean, by the way.) That's why I disliked 93% finders in SLRs...those supposedly showed you the same amount of the picture as a mounted slide, but for full-frame B&W prints what it meant was that there were sometimes surprises on the negative, things you didn't see in the viewfinder when you took the shot.

That's why I liked 100% finders, or as close as I could get.

So for years I learned to frame very tightly and very precisely, to the point that I do it without thinking now.

What I'm trying to do at the moment is trying to retrain myself, to shoot looser, and leave some air around the edges, so I have room to crop later.

Which brings up the question, why not just get a 35mm lens and continue to frame tightly? Well, it's what I've been doing up till now. It's very natural to me and I'm happy with it. But here's why (I know some of you don't need this explained. I'm explaining this in a bit more detail for the benefit of those who might not know it all yet):

This is the distortion correction panel in ACR. Your chosen Editor might look different, but I suspect you have the same controls. And of course when you correct perspective distortion in software, you lose some of the picture...

As shot

With vertical transform (distortion correction) applied.

Note what's going on at the bottom of the frame; when you re-crop to a rectangle, you're going to lose a fair amount on the sides of the picture.

Hence, the need to back off, shoot looser, and leave more air. In the old days, I couldn't crop (that is, if I wanted to print full frame, to the blackline). Now, I have to crop—sometimes (when I want to use distortion correction in post). Can I re-learn to shoot differently? I don't know.

Old dogs, etc.
The problem is that when I put the 28mm on the camera, I do exactly what I've always done: frame tightly, all the way out to the edges. Only with a somewhat wider FoV.

So far, I remember to step back and leave cropping room sometimes; but old habits are hard to break, and I'd say that at best I've been able to remember to "shoot looser" about half the time. So far.

Anyway, this is just an experiment. I'm just going to try it for a while, and see how it goes. (I do that a lot, obviously. Always setting myself little "exercises.") Maybe I'll go back to a 35mm and framing tightly, I don't know.

Anyway, that's the reason "why the 28mm."

Mike

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Auntipode: "You decided to shoot with a 28mm and crop in post process rather than tightly frame in camera with a 35mm...therefore you needed your head examined? :-) "

Jonas: "Doesn't the D800 also have a 1.2x mode, 25 Mpix? That brings you to 34mm-e or so."

Mike replies: It does, but that doesn't help. The crop modes actually crop what's recorded, and what I need is the opposite—a bit of excess area in the image.

I actually have no trouble doing it—when I remember to do it. It's just remembering that's tough.

Robert Howell: "Jayzuz Mike, give yerseff a brekk. Complicated ain't nississarally butter. Do'ou have a cell phone handy? A snap shoota'? Take it down a notch or two. Hearts only last so long eh fella? The light will always be there. Sleep Data, sleep. Go to Paris."

Mike replies: You misspelled...oh, never mind.

Joe: "I've been going through the same process, also with the D800. But I don't do much perspective correction. Instead, I had begun to believe that I shoot too tight in general. I started to look at the images I was bringing home and wishing I could step back a few paces.

"Back when I started shooting digital and had all those free shutter releases to play with, I always shot wide and cropped. But over time as I tried to print larger and larger, I began to regret losing all those pixels, and I eventually got to the point where I framed everything exactly as I wanted it in the final image. I conserved pixels as if they cost money. I never cropped.

"But lately I've decided that I should begin to emulate some favorite photographers who love lots of space around their subjects, and I've been training myself to shoot much wider. And because it's with a D800, I feel much freer to do some cropping when necessary. It's both unsettling and thrilling to shoot in a way that your gut tells you is wrong.

"It's all about training your eye to do these things without thinking, to get to the point where your gut tells you it's right, and I'm starting to get there. I still hesitate to crop in post-production—some part of me is still imagining a 40-inch wide print and how much I'll regret losing those pixels. But I've started to change the way I think.

"It's quite gratifying."

Dogman (partial comment): "When I first started shooting, back in the Jurassic Age, the 35mm frame drove me nuts. Color snapshots coming back from the processor left stuff out of the edges of the picture, slide mounts cropped out part of the photo and I had to file out the negative carrier to get the edges of the frame when I printed my black and whites photos in the darkroom. I was using Nikon F cameras with 100% viewfinders. This all changed whenever I bought a Leica rangefinder and the bright lines were only a best guess of what would actually be in the final photograph. I learned to shoot much looser and crop as necessary in the darkroom. It was a bit liberating to know your composition didn't solely depend on the instant, that your framing could be contemplated and refined later on."

Blog Note

I didn't mean to bring the good conversation of yesterday to a screeching halt, but, on the advice of my doctor's nurse, I spent last a good chunk of last evening in the ER...which is an interesting place, with nice people. The problem with it, I've decided, is that a) when you're there you're either sick, hurt, or worried, and b) the meter is running at a frantic rate, clicking off the dollars like a Geiger counter in a uranium mine. I'm fine, by the way. They thought I might be having a mini-stroke, a.k.a. "TIA," but I wasn't. "You have a normal human brain!" the doctor informed me cheerfully after my CT scan. No sign of past strokes or what he tactfully referred to as "masses." Then he added, "Scratch that. I mean a healthy human brain. You'll have to tell me if it's normal!"

Sort of. I was thinking, well, I like primes and not zooms, and black-and-white more than color, and prints more than on-screen images, and pictures with people more than landscapes, and so forth.

Not entirely normal. Scratch that—not entirely average.

In other words, I had just been one of the worried ones. But not any more. Now I'm reassured. But poorer. We still have to explain the strange symptoms, but hopefully a follow-up visit with my doctor next week will do that.

I did very little at the hospital but lie around, but for some reason it seemed to tire me out anyway. So I spent today resting and listening to Coleman Hawkins. I think I might spend a good chunk of tomorrow resting,  too. On the other hand, I suspect that resting too much might be what got me into trouble in the first place.

But you don't want to hear about that...

[Con't. in the next post]

Mike

Random Excellence: Gueorgui Pinkhassov

By Gueorgui Pinkhassov

All things considered, Magnum photographers are probably the once and future "élite of street."

From a large set here. And here he is on Magnum Photos.

Mike
(Thanks to robert e)

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
A book of interest today:

There's a short video overview of the book here.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Troels: "He is also to be found on Instagram."

Mike replies: Some of those shots on Instagram are amazing. It can be almost discouraging to encounter someone so talented....

Elisabeth Spector: "The content of Pinkhassov's images is as compelling as any I've seen, but it is his use of color that has me holding my breath as I look at each successive image. His use of red, the way it drives the energy of his compositions and punctuates the details, reminds me of music somehow—notes across a page that tie all of his work together into a larger piece of art. His use of blues and greens is a little more subtle, but no less delicious. I swear I got goosebumbs when I started to see all of those colors pop out of his images—uncannily like Fred Herzog, my favorite color photographer—but certainly not derivative in any way. His story-telling and use of framing,light, layers, etc. would make these great photos in B&W, but it is his use of color that really puts the images in another league (for me, anyway). I generally dislike street photography in color, and I just realized why: most such images don’t seem to use color to create a better or more interesting image. In fact, color seems often to be used when the tonalities just don’t work well enough in black and white. But with Pinkhassov and Herzog, color is at least an equal player, used just as deliberately as all of the other components and creating a full orchestral effect (way beyond the effect of just a strong solo or quartet), if I can keep using that analogy. What a treat…thank you for this post.  Now I know where to get my fix when I don’t have my Herzog (Vancouver Photographs) handy to pore over."

Mike replies: I know exactly what you mean Elisabeth. Many "photographers in color" (as opposed to color photographers) don't seem to realize that every color photograph is about color, and if the color doesn't work then the photograph doesn't work. It really is like a different, co-equal problem, as if you do have to layer one artwork over another. It's enormously difficult to get it right, and uncommon to find photographers who get it right. It's definitely the outstanding thing about Herzog.

Dave: "Thanks a lot—these photos put me in a day-long depression. This guy is so good that I might just throw away my camera and give up. From now on, when you post 'Random Exellence' make sure it's a style of photography most of us could at least try to copy. These photos are just too good."

A Tip: Canvas Value in Photoshop

Homage to What the Duck

This is an artwork on display at the AIC. Made me smile because it reminded me of the What the Duck duck. Unfortunately I didn't note the title or artist of the piece. That's probably just as well, because I doubt the artist would be impressed with my "interpretation." Although Aaron Johnson might be.

But I'm just playing. Here's the tip I wanted to pass along: because I'm dealing with tone a lot in practicing my B&W conversions, It's important to have a neutral background for the images. Photoshop CS6's default in Preferences > Interface is a dark gray. I like that for the bars'n'boxes, because it converts the text labels to white which makes them easier for me to read. But then the "canvas" (the background, when the image is smaller than the working space) is too dark.

You've probably heard of "middle gray." That's the name for the gray tone that's supposedly halfway between black and white. It's 18% reflectance, or 50% lightness in Lab Color, or hex triplet #777777, or 128 in hexadecimal notation (confused yet? All just ways of saying "sort of a medium gray"). Middle gray is allegedly what in-camera meters assume an average scene should average to; actually it isn't—they use 12–13%, as Ctein has written about several times. In the Zone System, middle gray is Zone V (Roman numeral five) and it's what everything else is pegged to. 

But middle gray is a bit too dark for me. I prefer about a Zone VI (six). Any darker and I get "fooled" into making my picture a bit too dark, because it pops off that too-dark background even though it's slightly too dark itself. Zone VI is #999999; I prefer a tiny bit lighter, #9e9e9e (158). Of course you can set it for bright fuschia is that's what tickles your corneas.

So how do you reset the value (value = lightness or darkness) of the canvas (the background) in Photoshop? It's easy: Just pick the foreground color you want, then choose the Paint Bucket, then hit Shift-click. Viola, as the second fiddle said.

And now you can tell that I overcorrected for corner vignetting. Bet you didn't notice that in the version up at the top.

Mike

P.S. Anyone want to confirm whether it's done the same way in Lightroom? That I don't know.

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Glenn Gordon: "The sculptor is Constantin Brancusi...I believe the title of the piece is 'The Blonde Negress.'"

Mike replies: Thanks for the tip! It appears that he did many variations, and I'm guessing the "blonde" ones are the gold-colored metal ones. This one is "White Negress II."

At any rate, not a duck.

Dave Polaschek: "Note that in Photoshop you can right-click on the canvas and get a pop-up to choose the value for the canvas fill, too. Even works when right-clicking on the background in the print dialog as of CS6. And if you open multiple views on a single document (View > New Window for {document} ) you can have different canvas colors for each view (and the print dialog will track which one was frontmost when you selected File > Print...) which can be useful when you're proofing for display."

Mystery Man?

Twenty Photo-Dawg points if you can tell me who this is without using Google or Tineye.

I'll post the answer, photographer, link, etc. later today, so come back then and see if you got it.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

RUSTY: "HCB."

Mike replies: No.

Ron Warren: "Norman Mailer?"

Mike replies: No.

Will Whitaker: "Rapper Cee Lo Green?"

Mike replies: No!

As a number of people guessed, that's DDD, also known as David Douglas Duncan, born 1916, in 2006. (Those of you who know him personally, no fair [g]—yes, I'm looking at you, Pierce.) The portrait is by Kristy Wigglesworth for the AP, and surfaced again this week because of the record price paid for one of DDD's Leica M3D's. (You get that, right? Three D.) Duncan is notable in a lot of ways—he was a constant presence in the photo magazines in the 1960s and '70s, he was a friend of Picasso's and a sort of visual biographer of the painter's, and he was involved in a high-profile contretemps with H.C.-B. a few years ago after publishing a number of pictures of Henri he took while they had lunch. Not necessarily in that order. A former Marine himself, he "embedded" (before we ever heard that term) with Marines in Korea and Viet Nam and created two of the finest books of combat photography in the history of the medium, This Is War! (1951) and War Without Heroes (1970). He was also instrumental in bringing Nippon Kogaku (Nikon), and by extension the rest of the postwar Japanese optical and camera industry, to the attention to the wider world, for which he is revered at Nikon.

How to Make Sharp Photographs

By Ctein

There are some aspects to the magazine business that may not be instantly apparent to some readers. The first is that repetition is mandatory if you're going to serve the entire readership. Different readers come in with different levels of expertise. Not everyone learns everything the first time they read it (truthfully, hardly any of us do). Also, there's a significant turnover in readership from year to year, so the article you wrote two years ago is going to be news to quite a few people today.

For those reasons, articles on the basics, which can bore long-term and experienced readers, have to be part of a magazine's stock in trade.

This is going to be one of those.

•     •     •

This is not specifically about the Nikon D800 and D800E, even if they do provide the talking points. It applies, in general, to any camera between 28 and 50 megapixels.

Sharpness isn't an either-or phenomenon. It exists on a continuum, where each contributor of unsharpness plays its part. Recommended practices aren't absolutes, neither obligatory nor guarantees of success. They just make things better.

Tripods
If this sounds vague and unhelpful, consider the number of people who took Nikon's technical recommendations for getting the most out of the D800 as gospel. Nikon recommends using a tripod. That's a good idea. Is it necessary, all the time? Absolutely not. It's quite possible to get pixel-perfect sharpness handheld; you just need to use a short enough shutter speed*. How short? That depends on you. A good starting point, if you're using a 50mm lens, is 1/125th sec. Really, though, it depends upon your technique, skill, and practice.

Tripods: Sometimes you don't need 'em. Sometimes you need two.
(Ctein in action in 1991. Photo by Paula Butler.)

You may very well find that your threshold for consistently sharp results doesn't change directly in proportion to the focal length. If you can handhold the 50mm lens well at 1/125th sec., you might be able to hold a 24mm equally steady at 1/60th sec, but maybe not. Different lenses give different balance to the camera that can make it more or less stable in your hands. Image stabilization systems have different efficacy with different lenses. I wasn't comfortable handholding my Olympus Pen with the 45mm lens below 1/25th sec, but I could routinely stay sharp with the 12mm lens at 1/4 sec.

Long lenses are tricky because they shift the balance point away from the camera body. With my Pentax 67, I could handhold the 105mm lens at 1/60th sec. easily; with care I could go down to 1/30th. I needed 1/250th sec. and above with the 300mm lens.

I found all of this out by trial and error. That's the way you'll find out.

Lenses
Nikon provides a list of lenses that they think perform especially well with the D800. But, just as with tripods, they are recommendations, not marching orders. When you're down in the ƒ/8 range, it's hard to tell most good lenses apart. I'm not talking about exceptional, rare and costly lenses. Yes, there will be nuances that separate out the exceptional, but they will be subtle and slight, even with mondo megapixels. So, where do you see the big differences for your money? At the wider apertures. Exceptional performance at low f-numbers is usually what you're paying the big bucks for.

Apertures
Finally, diffraction is not the big bugaboo people try to make it out to be. Yes, somewhere between ƒ/5.6 and ƒ/8, it will start to subtly degrade sharpness. Note the emphasis. The effects remain subtle until you get below ƒ/11. They don't get really serious until you're pushing ƒ/16 and smaller. That's all you need to know about it. Really, truly.

Let's put this all in a historical perspective. In 35mm terms, the new Nikons are capable of resolving 70–80 line pairs per millimeter. That's really, really sharp, it's more than twice what was considered "acceptable" sharpness in 35mm film photography. But it's not unbelievably, extraordinarily sharp. Film photographers managed to achieve this, handheld, with lenses mortals could afford, and they had to live with two handicaps digital photographers don't: poor film flatness and no image stabilization.

If they could do it, you can do it. Just practice, and learn your and your equipment's behaviors.

•     •     •

Here's another aspect of the magazine business: there's no shortage of good ideas for articles. What there always is is a shortage of space, time, and creative energy. I throw away lots of ideas (so does Mike), not because they wouldn't make great columns, but because something else takes precedence. Or, at least, they get perpetually deferred, as something shinier wanders across my mental landscape.

That's been happening to my off-topic columns. The last two were four and six months ago, respectively. I mean, it's not like I'm obligated to write one of those a month, but I'm way behind. Meanwhile, teas, and starships, and graphic novels, and maybe even parrots, are clamoring for space. I'm going to indulge them through the end of the year, as kind of a holiday gift. I won't say every column for the next four weeks will be an "off topic" one; most likely I'll get distracted by some technological shiny along the way. I know my weaknesses. But I'll try for at least three out of four.

Until next time....

Ctein

*Or flash with a short enough duration, in situations where it provides all or most of the exposure. —Ed.

Regular columnist Ctein sharpens you up every Wednesday on TOP.

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
A book of interest today:

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Hugh Crawford (partial comment): "My three tricks for sharper handheld slow-shutter-speed photos are: increase the polar moment of inertia of the camera by attaching a collapsed monopod or tripod to the camera, or just bolt a 2x4 to it. If you are using an eye level camera, try to have the camera make firm contact with your head. Holding it upside down with the body pressed against your forehead works. I used to have a small block of wood with a accessory shoe attached that I would put in the hotshoe of the camera so it would make firm contact with my head. You are effectively adding five pounds to the mass of the camera. Of course this works even better if you are a chicken (I'm not kidding; Google 'camera on chicken'). [Seriously, Google it. —Ed.]

"Waist-level viewing with a taut neck strap beats all the above. The best advice for handheld marginal shutter speeds is to shoot three-exposure bursts, then pick the sharpest one later. Usually it turns out to be the second one but not always.

"Tripods work best of course, the heavier the better. (Unless you are on a bridge or a dance floor, where handheld with knees bent works better.) Once upon a time the hot setup was to fill the center column of a Tiltall with lead. If you aren't using a heavy tripod usually exposure times longer than 1/2 second are sharper than 1/4th."

 

Nikkor 28mm ƒ/1.8 Follow-Up

In this post about the D800 I noted that my new lens, the Nikon AF-S Nikkor 28mm ƒ/1.8G, was "explicitly not on Nikon's list of D800-safe lenses," and I gave the whole list in a footnote. Bruno Masset writes to tell me that the reason it wasn't on the list was that it wasn't out when the first version of the list was created. He says, "the latest revision of the 'D800 Technical Guide' lists 23 recommended lenses, that is, seven more than in the first edition, and includes the 28mm ƒ/1.8G."

Just thought we should set the record straight.

Mike
(Thanks to Bruno)

UPDATE: It appears I have to eat crow on this one. I took Bruno's word for this, and didn't check it myself, but I'll be darned if I could find the "latest revision" of the list once I went looking for it. And although I've tried several ways to contact him, I'm getting radio silence from Bruno so far.

A good example of the old journalist's adage: "If your mother says she loves you, check it."

If this mystery gets solved, I'll post another update.

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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The Quality of Attention

Just one brief comment to follow up on yesterday: a corollary of the huge explosion in democratized media, user-directed presentation of work and small-scale amateur Web curating, and access to self-publishing, is a corresponding diminution of audience.

In other words, the more pictures there are, the fewer people see most of them.

The number one complaint I hear from photographers amounts to "why isn't anyone paying attention to my work?" They work hard, they know they're improving, they think they're accomplishing something—but no one seems to care. It's the shared condition these days. No one seems to even look, for the most part. Unless a handful of three-word comments on Flickr or a handful of "Likes" on Facebook are enough for you.

One of the things that a good critic, curator, teacher, or gallery owner does is to pay attention to the work they think is significant. The exciting thing about John Szarkowski in the 1960s and '70s was that his deep attentiveness to the work of many theretofore unknown photographers (Arbus, Friedlander, Eggleston, et al.)—and his articulateness about why they deserved it—engaged the attention of a much wider audience. But the old structure—galleries, museums, old-media critics, and book publishers—are as far behind the curve now as anyone else. Individuals are struggling to feel their way into the new order. Street photography collectives and social-media meeting places are just one of many facets of this. The atomized and far-flung micro-communities of the Web (including this one, I guess) amount to attempts to address the questions "what's worth paying attention to?" and "who's paying attention?" and perhaps most importantly for most photographers, "how do I get people to pay attention to me?" All everyone wants is a little traction. Or a little more.

From maybe 1965 or 1970 to 1995 or 2000, photography classes in schools were pretty widespread—I taught a program at a small high school for three years that accepted up to 50 students a year, and my son was a photography student at his large public high school when they finally closed down the school darkroom. And that wasn't useful so much as a nurturing-bed for photographers as it was a nuturing-bed for an audience for photographers. Those experiences created an appreciation for photography in people when they were students that often survived into adult life in one way or another. Part of the mission statement of this site is to be part of the audience for photography—to look, to discuss, to appreciate. To pay attention. And simultaneously to help develop and encourage a wider audience as well.

I'm not giving this topic the attention it deserves, of course. (I know, insert rimshot.) I'm bashing out this mini-essay over the course of an hour or two over coffee, as usual, and it will go live well before it even cools from the oven. But I think this is an overlooked aspect of the fast-changing nature of photography in the Digital Transition: the ways we're paying attention, the nature of the audience, the very qualities of work that attract us to it and the attentiveness we give it. (Heh—I mistyped "give" as "gift" at first, and that might even be more accurate).

One thing that I might do over the coming year is to publish "mini-portfolios" of photographers' work, not unlike Carl's mini-portfolio of Texas pictures below. Peter Turnley and I have struggled with this: he'd like an outlet for large sets of work—we've published a few of those, such as this one—yet I've come to feel that TOP isn't really the best place to present successive full portfolios of new work from just a few photographers. But it might be useful to present a "taste" of the work of many varied photographers, iconoclastically and esoterically—perhaps to serve as a roadsign to larger sets on other sites, or as windows to more specialized communities.

(Of course, you know what comes of most of my plans. I have too many ideas, and little in the way of resources or plain old help. TOP is stuck at one tiny stuffed-to-the-rafters office and one overworked guy in a bathrobe. (Not as dramatic as Ed Buziak producing Darkroom User magazine on one creaky little Macintosh in the pantry of a centuries-old cottage in deep rural dirt-road Wales, but take my word for this, it's a lot of work to publish two or three posts a day 350 days a year.) We're just crying out for 600 square feet instead of 100 and a part-time editorial assistant, but I can't make it happen. And most likely never will. (And by the way, speaking of making things happen, we are going to do that reader print sale, I swear. Soon. Someday. I will get around to it. Really.))

Trying to publish mini-portfolios might be a better way to make enemies than friends, who knows. ("That bastard wouldn't publish my work, I'm never going to visit that site again!") And, unfortunately, I know intimately how much work is involved to realize even such a simple idea, and it is non-trivial*. And I have too much to do already. But who knows. I like this thought.

Mike

*I'll give you one example. Remember that article I did about shooting Ilford XP2? You'll notice there are four example shots in the article...a mini-mini-portfolio of sorts. Well, to get those four shots, I searched "Ilford XP2" on Google and Flickr and two other sites; spent hours looking at several thousand prospects; searched for the contact details and sent emails requesting permission to publish to eight photographers. I got lucky; four of them replied before go time. Then I had to go get the images and prep them for my interface. Elapsed time? At least three hours, maybe four. In my day, that's non-trivial.

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Kevin Shoenmakers: "What I did when I grew tired of 'nice pic' comments on the Internet was print 30 high quality prints (or have them printed, I should say) and contacted a few places I know of that do temporary exhibits but which aren't galleries. Hospitals, cinemas, libraries, that kind of thing. I'm now on my fourth exhibit, and have another one coming up in 2013. I've sold a few of the prints but I'm not out of the red yet. However, seeing people actually taking five minutes out of their day to properly look at the photos, read the captions and appreciate my work with more than a fleeting glance is just priceless."

Oren Grad: "The problem with the quality of attention is first and foremost the quantity of attention. That is, there can never be enough of it. Time is our most precious and limited resource. There is no general solution to the problem of how to assimilate the massive flow of pictures—it can't be done. Pick your poison—try to drink from the firehose yourself, or spend some of your precious time searching for curators who seem to be sympatico, and who can more efficiently point you toward things you might be interested in. But you will never know—can never know—whether you have missed something that would have changed your life had you only applied a different search strategy.  No, scratch that—you can be sure that you have missed something important, and also that you will never know what it was—and it cannot be otherwise."

Steven House: "Can I just say 'Bastard' first and get it over with."

Mark: "Whilst studying on a university photography course we had a lecture from a visiting professor. The main thrust of his talk was 'You are taking too many photographs.' He was referencing journalism more, but his theory (with thanks to Barthes) was that we were experiencing 'A Studium of Punctums.'

"Every paper/outlet/photographer is obsessed with getting that one piercing photo that captures our attention, the Punctum. The result of this many Punctums? Well we just have a Studium of them, they become the white noise and we become so much less sensitive to them.

"I see this reflected on the web, amongst the forums and the photo sharing sites. So many on there seem obsessed with the single image which has to be so attention grabbing, that it actually seems to limit creativity and also diminish interest in them (certainly mine). There are a few places where the multi-photo story still exists and carries on, but I think as an art form we are sadly lacking more examples of that style of work. A sign of the times I guess, and that was one of the points from the visiting professor. Our culture and media that is built around instant dissemination of news and events seems to demand the instant one-off hit...and lots of them."

Mike replies: Interesting. And what he observes is a bit strange when we consider how many art photographers succeed by doing the opposite: just describing one thing exactly but quietly, in repose.

'Cyber Monday' Fails to Materialize

TOP had a perfectly average and ordinary day yesterday. Based on the "my-anecdotal-evidence-is-good-enough-for-me" school of reasoning, this leads me to conclude that so-called "Cyber Monday" is a myth.

(Sorry, too much Onion.)

Mike
(Thanks to James Hengst)

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
A book of interest today:

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Arun: "I almost freaked out on reading the article at the link. Then a simple calculation showed there were a half-million seconds in that six-day trip; assuming two girls shot an image each second (not sleeping, talking etc. etc.) that would be a million images. Unless the cameras had 12 fps, of course. But you got me there. Good one. I hope. Because the alternative (that this is true) is too horrible to contemplate!"

Contemporary Street Photography: Where Can I Find the Good Stuff?

By Andrew Kochanowski

"Street photographers" tend to dislike the very term, but, having failed to mint a better phrase, it will just have to do. Whether you blame the Internet or limitless card capacity, there are now literally tens of thousands of photographers publicly taking a crack at it. As its practitioners know, forget the banality of evil—try the banality of much of online street photography. (Here's Blake Andrews' take on that.) So who can we blame for foisting this stuff on us?

Nick Turpin and his In-Public street photography collective, for starters. In 2000, Turpin brought together an almost unfairly talented group of (mostly) English street photographers into an online group. Who knew that while the 1960s street photography cohort were finishing up, and the snapshot aesthetic became the new vogue, there were still people looking for something un-posed and not newsworthy to photograph? Nick did. It looked easy, too—all those quirky juxtapositions, geometric assemblies, and sneaky body parts. Suddenly, street photography was no longer the province of cranky loners dipping Tri-X in their bathroom. No, what we got instead was a flood of Tri-X-y stuff with Magnum-sized watermarks. And much of it descended on Flickr and other open sites as soon as bandwidth got cheap.

It is fashionable—and mostly true—to say that Flickr is the undisputed repository for self-indulgence. But since at least the mid-2000s, at least one dark corner of the Flickerverse has housed what is possibly the central hub for street photography. A curious pre-Facebook mix of social media and photography, the Hardcore Street Photography group (HCSP), which looks like every one of the millions of other Flickr groups, became the largest street photography meeting-point in the world. This 46,000-member group, if nothing else, deserves a footnote in the history of photography, if for nothing other than providing a concentrated place to look for decent street photography.

For a number of years, HCSP has had two functions. First, and most obviously to the newcomer, it hosts a self-described, heavily "curated" pool of photos. Second, it serves as a clearinghouse of news, personality, gossip, and announcements in, of, and around street photography. It is an amorphous place: HCSP has been administered by a small, unabashedly undemocratic, often-changing set of photographers for years. Unlike Eggleston and his suitcase full of slides arriving at John Szarkowski's door, all it takes to try "get into the pool" at HCSP is a Flickr account and an uploaded photo. The administrators at HCSP pick and choose from roughly 200 photo submissions daily, and, with Beria-like efficiency, weed out well more than 99%. That makes it approximately 600,000 images a year that pass through the site. Once or twice a week an image or two from this mass makes its way into the pool.

The pool currently has a little more than 3,000 images. The interesting, the strange, the contentious, the difficult to decipher, or just plain great—subject to, of course, continual debate whether the photos are actually meaningless, self-indulgent effluvia, whether there is such a thing as street photography, and whether street photography may happen indoors, at the beach, at a party, or in a hurricane.

HCSP's role as a street photography clearinghouse has extended from the first mention of Vivian Meier’s auction-purchased negatives ("What Do I Do With This Stuff (Other Than Giving It To You?") to giving previously-hidden first-rate street photographers a wide audience for both old and new work.

Don Hudson, Girl with Billboard

Several organized candid photography collectives have formed around the world in recent years. Though not all do this in the same way, unlike the physical-world counterparts in the 1970s, these working collectives are organized around geography (like Seconds2Real, comprised of street photographers from Austria and Germany) or quasi-geography (like Un-Posed, which draws attention to Polish photographers), and around style (like Burn My Eye). They tend to use online platforms to aggregate portfolios, present group edits, organize public shows, and provide on-demand print or book distribution. And there are Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook stream images and announcements daily.

Traditional publishing has been—er, slow to join this party. Thames & Hudson did put out Street Photography Now in the fall of 2010, packaging older Alex Webb, Martin Parr, and Bruce Gilden—presumably for placement purposes—with a number of lesser-known street photographers, many of whom are actively associated with the wider online street photography world. That brick and mortar book was not without controversy over, ironically, accusations of having misappropriated text from a street photography blog, Michael David Murphy's 2point8.

The more relevant physical world counterpart, made possible by the collaborative aspect of contemporary street photography, is on-demand magazine and book publishing. Street photography has spawned serious discussion and curation in new media that is almost entirely divorced from the traditional fine art gallery and criticism worlds. Street Reverb, an online magazine, itself an outgrowth of HCSP, has a clear view of the current street photography scene bundled with intelligent curation of ongoing projects.

Whether it has been the influence of Martin Parr or something in the water, the physical center of contemporary street photography is firmly in Great Britain. Street photography has been the focus of at least two sprawling festivals in the U.K. in recent years, at Format Festival, Derby, and the London Festival of Photography. The Third Floor Gallery in Cardiff, Wales, actively showcases contemporary street photography—as it should since its founders had a close connection to the HCSP world.

The confluence of technology and the resulting opportunity to discuss, review, share, critique, dismiss, and fight over the very nature of the genre has been, in a very real sense, revelatory. There is an almost unlimited flood of images that is in real time being produced, sifted, and curated into higher and higher quality piles. Photographers have simultaneously become editors and publishers, blurring a traditional line. Having access to each other's work, photographer/editors have in recent years melded and produced spectacular—and unexpected—group edits (here's an example). There is in a very real sense a continuing conversation between literally hundreds of active photographers over the boundaries and nature of the street photography umbrella.

Ten years ago, cheap, on-demand publishing and social media that disseminate good work from all of this output did not really exist. It's not your Daddy's decisive moment any more. 

Andrew

Andrew Kochanowski is a photographer and member of the Burn My Eye and Un-Posed collectives. He has written for TOP before.

[Ed. Note: As a general matter of policy, I don't allow comments from people who are plugging their own sites, for the simple and understandable reason that if I allowed it, a lot more people would come here just to do that and we'd get swamped. If you know of a good site it's not off limits to mention it, especially if you have something cogent to say about it, but please refrain from plugging your own. Thanks.

Same thing with links to individual pictures—by all means link to them if they're pertinent and you have something to say about them or they illustrate your point (Ken Wajda's comment—first "Featured Comment" below—is a perfect example of this), but if it's nothing but a naked plug, it won't be published.

Also, be aware that there are certain sites I will not link to because of previous difficulties with individuals associated with them, so if you're puzzled by a non-inclusion, it's possible it has nothing to do with you and also nothing to do with the quality of photography at the site.]

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
A book of interest today:

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Kenneth Wajda: "Street Photography is so subjective because we are also attached to the photos—we were there. But the images are of strangers, no viewer has that connection so it has to have a story or a 'ah ha' moment for the viewer.

"Here's one I shot in Denver last week that I think has that extra something. Complete luck. Right place, right time.

"Street is really probably better called 'Life' photography, as that's what I'm shooting, the moments of life that pass in front of me. In 50 years, when most of these images have been lost, then these will mean more. That's one reason why Vivian's work is so captivating.

"Having worked for 15 years as a photojournalist for a daily newspaper, we used to call these 'roamers' because we'd roam around looking for them.  And we'd use them to fill in space or give a quick weather report."

Mike replies: Another problem in my view with the term "street" is that an overly rigid interpretation of it might limit what people think of as its possibilities. For instance, Erwitt made what I think of as "street" photographs in museums.

Carl Weese's first picture in the post just below this one isn't a street photograph, even though it's a photograph of a street (well, that's a road, I guess, not a street, but you know what I mean). And based on my understanding of the term, this photograph by Juan Buhler seems to be a "street photograph," somehow, even though it's a picture of the ocean.

Ed Hawco's rant: "Back in the early days of 'Web 2.0' I was a big fan of the so-called 'democratization' of media and all that stuff about 'crowd sourcing' and the 'hive mind.' I liked the fact that anyone could throw anything into the ring and get it seen and commented on. But now that I've seen it in action for a decade I mostly see it as the technologically-enabled extrapolation of group-think. As a result, the more a site goes on about users 'voting up' the faster I run away, because after a while the things they're voting up all look the same.

"I see this on a lot of photography sites that have 'street photography' categories, such as 500px and 1x. While there is some good work in there, you don't appreciate it as much when you have to slog through countless repetitions of the same old derivative tropes, again and again. I mean, how many too-contrasty black and white photos of a person walking past a sign that somehow mimics them do we need? Do we really need more photos of random urban beggars randomly passed out on park benches? Old people are not more interesting just because you crank up the 'clarity' slider on their faces!

"I'm still a fan of the Web and digital technologies, but I want them to enable individual talent and human curation and not just amplify the choice of the mob. I've come to realize the importance of a curator's or editor's view, and how that is a skill that should be celebrated intstead of kicked in the pants and declared 'elitist.' After all, when 'The Borg' (Star Trek reference) curates everything, everything looks like it was curated by The Borg. (End of rant.)"

Mike adds: Ed, you might be interested in the interview with Andy Adams of Flak Photo just posted at BreakThru Radio. He addresses a lot of the same concerns you're bringing up. (Note that the controls for the audio at the link are counterintuitive—they should show up in a bar at the bottom of the browser, not the page. Oh, and by the way, it's good to listen to while browsing pictures at Flak Photo.)

Ricardo Silva Cordeiro: Really interesting comments here. One phrase by John Krumm caught my attention: 'I don't do much street photography myself (too shy to point at strangers).' I'm a shy person myself (technically speaking I'm an introvert) and one of the things that surprised me when I decided to embark on 'street photography' was how empowered I felt doing it. It permited me to connect to the world in a way that I'd never experienced before. I've always been interested on this theme, on how to handle this brief contact with strangers, and it's been surprising to discover how many of the great photographers were/are actually shy (Henri Cartier-Bresson was one of them)."

Mike replies: Interesting. I believe Juan Buhler has spoken of something similar. Maybe he'll jump in and confirm or deny.

Juan responds: "I'm coming late to this as I'm nowadays traveling down the Americas full-time instead of spending my days at a desk with internet access.

"About shyness, yes, I consider myself shy, although I've worked on it since high school. Street photography is one, maybe the biggest way for me to work on my shyness. Not much more to say, other than it could be argued that we shy types are actually 'hiding' behind a camera—taking photos in the street lets you get close to people, but because you're taking photos you don't have to get too close.

"About the general topic of street photography...I tend to agree, of all things, with the comment by Eric Perlberg: 'mediocre tribute band' is what I think about when I see most street photos out there. Including mine. But the few photographers Eric mentions strike me to be somewhere in the spectrum between 'pretentious' and 'blah,' and don't do much for me either. In other words: what's out there mostly sucks, and my work is middle of the road. :-)

"For a long time I've had the feeling that my photos are stuck in this uninteresting, cliché, 'already done' place. But the impetus to go out and make photos, I find, doesn't have much to do with any of the above. I am not asking or answering any important questions, or doing anything that the people who like to write pretentious sentences about their photography claim they are doing. I just like to shoot."

Dan: "I shoot this...style...of photography because it's the only one that feels...real...to me. I'm really not interested in taking a picture of a flower, or finding the exact shutter speed / f-stop combination to perfectly capture the full range of the subtle tonal gradations of this afternoon sun splattered on a spackled wall. But I am interested in the man over there having a cigarette, staring at something in the distance."

Herman Krieger takes a somewhat more literal view of "street photography":

Carl Weese: Texas Towns (a Mini-Portfolio)

Canyon, Texas

Zephyr, Texas

Abilene, Texas

Gatesville, Texas

Scotland, Texas

 

 Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

David Miller: "Hey—it's Saskatchewan! (Without the snow….)

Kevin Purcell: "Am I the only one to hear the (Ry Cooder) theme from Paris, Texas when viewing these?"

Jason: "Where are the people?"

Roger Bradbury: "I keep looking again at 'Canyon, Texas.' Thanks, Carl."

Pentax Lenses

...And speaking of Pentax, B&H is having a sale today of two of the more expensive Pentax lenses, the 16–50mm and 50–135mm, for ~60% off. Have a look....

Mike

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Ted: "Oh boy, I'm in trouble. I just ordered both lenses: the 16–55, and the 50–135. I just blew my entire 2013 budget for photography gear, and the year hasn't even started yet. But you'll get a small cut, so I feel better about it. Can you offer any tips on how to justify this to my better half?"

Mike replies: I don't know your better half, but I'd act properly concerned about the amount you did spend while emphasizing (several times if you can) the amount you saved by buying them today and both at once. Good luck man, hope you make it through in one piece. [g]

How About Some Pictures of Texas?

Since Texas is being bruited about (somehow that's a phrase I don't think Texans would approve of), how about if some of you with access to it were to show the rest of us what it looks like?

I've been to Texas once, but mainly I got to see the inside of the convention rooms of the hotel where I was staying. We also took an uninspiring bus ride through the exurbs of Houston to another windowless building. I've really seen very little of Texas.

If you have a quintessential Texas picture you want to share, send me an 800-pixel wide JPEG saved in the sRGB color space, and I'll post a few of them below. My email address is in the right-hand sidebar.

Please also include your byline as you would like it to appear. (Otherwise I'll just use the name on the email.) And don't forget to say where the picture was taken!

[UPDATE 1:00 p.m.: I've gotten so many pictures now that I won't be able to post all the ones I've already received. So thank you very much, but no more please! My apologies to those who don't see their pictures here. At least I can say that I enjoyed seeing all of them....]

Mike

-

Sean C. Garrick: The Hamilton Pool Preserve, near Austin.

Jim Tiemann: Above the red car, I give you
"The Grassy Knoll." Dallas.

David Saxe: Convention Center lobby, San Antonio.

Ken White: Tea Party rally at the Alamo, San Antonio.

Markus Karner: Somewhere near Interstate 10,
West Texas, 1996.

Andrew Kochanowski: Houston, 2012.

Jim Bullard: LBJ Presidential Library, Austin.

Jochen Hettchen: Gas station, Terlingua, next to
Big Bend National Park.

Carl Leonardi: "Texas Earl"

[There have been more than a million "earl wells" drilled in Texas since 1919. —Ed.]

Rod Anderson: The late great "Big Tex" at the State Fair of Texas, Dallas.

Rob Heller: Texas State Capitol dome, Austin.

Andy deBruyn: Bee Caves Creek, Bee Caves

Andrew Hibma: Cotton harvest, Ferris

Jim Powers: Annual Tyler County Dogwood Festival
Open Rodeo, Woodville

Gabriele Harhoff: Marathon. "We live in Hamburg, but we go to Austin and West Texas every year if we can. In fact we are leaving for Austin this Wednesday!"

Gary Mortensen: Seasonal picture, Round Top

Elisabeth Spector: Upper Texas Gulf Coast wetlands, Seabrook. "I'm not sure what 'quintessentially Texan' means to non-Texans, but this image, for me, represents the natural beauty of the upper Texas Gulf Coast where I've lived almost my whole life."

Richard Wasserman: Lake Buchanan, an hour northwest of Austin. "Because of the drought they've been having for the last few years, the water level is down by about 25 feet."

Stan Banos

Jim Woodard: The Chisos Mountains, "by geological definition the only mountain range in the United States totally contained within the U.S. and within one state—Texas!"

Bruce Reeve: Alamo and Crockett Hotel sign, San Antonio

Paul M. Macdonald: Somewhere near Johnson City

Charles Simonds: Texas bluebonnets and longhorns,
north of Chappell Hill

David Raboin: Texas supercell. "An aerial view of a massive thunderstorm over central Texas. This stormcloud topped out at over 60,000 feet. What Texas lacks in topography is more than made up for by its wild sky. Here's a link to the story about how I took this photo."

Danny Spence: Panhandle sunset, Amarillo. "The land there is startlingly flat and in places there are no obstructions—hills, trees—for hundreds of miles."

 

Most of these were posted in the order they came in. I got lots more good ones, but I can't post them all. Thanks to everyone! —Mike

-

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Getting Better...Naturally

Last week I got carried away and bought my youngest brother a Pentax for his birthday. A profligate gift*, but he assures me it'll count for birthdays and Christmas for several years. I bought him a Pentax K-01. It hasn't been popular, so the price has plunged to as little as $316.95 at some places. [UPDATE Tuesday: B&H Photo now has the best current bargain on the K-01. —Ed.] At the same time, several people I've talked to who use them really like them. I just thought he might like the offbeat style, and the high image quality. He's very happy with it so far. I got him the black one with the 40mm pancake lens. (That one should be called a crêpe lens.)

I'm looking forward to seeing some of his pictures. (Hint, hint, Scott.)

Also last week, I found myself sinking slowly into a muck of agony about black-and-white conversions. Comparing Raw converters. Reading about this and that conversion technique. Does this look better, or this? Playing with tones, trying to get things just right.

But of course there is no longer a helpfully limited number of controls. There's an effective infinitude. Crazy-making.

It took me a few days to find the key: just do it. My new strategy is to take a few dozen pictures every day and convert two or three of them. Get them looking okay, then move on.

The hope is that I'll get better with practice. Maybe "hope" is too wishy-washy a word: I know I'm going to get better with practice. Because that's just what happens naturally.

My brother called me after he took his first JPEG. He's new to digital photography and I think he was feeling a little overwhelmed by all the options and the newness and unfamiliarity of all the procedures. I gave him the same advice—just take pictures, correct them as best you can, move on. The more often you take a few pictures, the better. I told him to pick up the camera every day, or as often as he can.

Of course, you do have to try to get better as you go. Mindful, not mindless. But I think a lot of things in photography are susceptible to this strategy—keep doing it, keep up the do-think-do-think-do servo mechanism, and you gradually get better at it. You might only make barely perceptible progress from one go to the next, but barely perceptible progress over a long period of time = major progress.

That's my kernel of wisdom for today.

Mike

*Thought process: first I was going to give him one of the old cameras I have hanging around here. Then I thought, wait a minute, he's going to have to invest a lot of time and effort into learning how to operate the camera and work on the pictures—why make him do that with an old, out of date camera that he might not be happy with for very long? A new camera makes much more sense because really, his time is worth a lot more than the cost of the camera. That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Doug: "My favorite B&W tool is still LightZone. Unfortunately, it's not available to new users at the moment. But for those who already have a license, continuing support—including updates to handle Raw files from recent camera models—is available from the volunteer LightZombie Project. I'm one of the founders of the LightZombie Project, so this is sort-of a plug. But we're not selling anything, and we don't have ads on the site. It's purely a volunteer project, done out of love for the LightZone software and a desire to help fellow LZ users."

Open Mike: Texas Wants to Secede

Apparently a number of citizens of the State of Texas would like to secede from the United States following the re-election of President Obama.

For once, I side with the most rabid of right-wingers: I say, let's let 'em.

Please?

It's not that I dislike Texans, mind you. I like every Texan I've personally ever met. It's just that I would really be interested in watching this happen. I think it could be tremendously entertaining.

Presumably they would make do with their current State Constitution for a while, but why wouldn't they write a whole new Constitution? They could. They could change the whole government if they wanted to. Even the type of government. Just the arguments over all that could keep us entertained for years.

They'd even be free to rename the new country (Conservatopia?)—although admittedly "The Republic of Texas" has a certain majesty to it. Let's face it, Texas is a great name.

Guns would be legal, or maybe mandatory, but would they have an army? A draft? For sure they'd only have one political party. The Ten Commandments would be on every courthouse lawn, no doubt, but would they actually write Old Testament injunctions into their new laws? Those tend to get dicey when it actually comes down to specifics. To obey Leviticus or not to obey Leviticus? You can see how much fun this might be.

There would be a few disadvantages, of course. The map of the U.S. would look funny until we got used to it. College kids would need passports for spring break on South Padre Island. And all our flags would have to be changed.

Unless we just split California in two to make up for it. That could work.

The new country would be responsible for protecting its own stretch of the Rio Grande, which could get ugly. We'd have to protect our own borders with Texas, too, though, since, presumably, vans packed full of desperate Texas liberals and hippies from Austin would be trying to sneak back into the United States all the time.

Or would Oklahoma and Louisiana want to join the new country? How would Texas feel about that? "Well...."

On the good side, the Dallas Cowboys would no longer be America's Team. And, no more U.S. presidents from Texas. Works for me.

There would be some questions, of course. What about Federal installations and infrastructure, and their share of the national debt? I say they should pay us back. Well, at least partly. And they'd need all new treaties with all the rest of the world's countries and so forth. All the while trying to keep their government really, really small.

Some people worry that the new country wouldn't do very well. But it would be the 40th largest country on earth and have an economy larger than Australia's, according to what I've heard. They'd do fine. This is no reason not to let them go.

Really, this is something I'd like to see. Talk about political theater. Just think of it: the election for the presidency of Texas. Wouldn't you like to follow that? Best reality TV ever.

And who knows, maybe they'd come up with something better than what they've got now and we could all learn something from them. Could happen.

Anyway, Texans are petitioning for their independence, and, by rule, the White House owes them a response sometime around mid-December. I can synopsize it for you right now: it will say "Read the 14th Amendment, ya knuckleheads!" Only more politely, and with lots more words. (Article 1 basically says States can't deprive American citizens of their rights and privileges as American citizens.)

They're no fun.

Oh well.

Mike

ADDENDUM Monday morning: My feelings are a little hurt that this post set a record for traffic on a Sunday, for the whole seven years I've been doing this. Jeez,  if so many people are going to come read something I write, couldn't it at least be something about photography? Sniff.

Secondly, of course I was just poking fun here. But if you're interested, the Wall Street Journal says there would be one particularly big upside and one equally big downside to secession for the states where the biggest petitions are coming from, in an article called "What seceding from the U.S. will cost you." I admit the upside is a biggie. Thanks to Paris for the link.

"Open Mike" is a series of off-topic ramblings that sometimes appears on Sundays.

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
A book of interest today:

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Ken White (partial comment): "Texas fought its own war of independence and made quite a good job of doing so. Many Texans take great pride in having been an independent country. It's interesting to live in Texas not having grown up here. It is a state of mind as much as a state within the union of the United States. It is a big place full of friendly people with big ideas who dream big dreams. Don't mess with Texas."

Marc Gibeault: "It's even more fun from here (Montreal)."

Stephen (partial comment): "As a native Texan, I would like to point out the following [...] around 117,000 people have signed their name in favor of this concept. According to a quick Google search, the state population is currently in the neighborhood of 25.6 million. This means that those 117k signatures represent less than half of a percent of Texas citizens. Again, less than 1/2 of 1%. (Assuming I did my math right. Which is always an assumption....)"

Mike replies: We're in bad shape if I'm the one who's supposed to be checking anybody's math.

MJFerron: "As one who lives in the Austin area I can assure you despite what one may read there is zero talk of secession of any kind in regular daily life. Nothing. It's just fluff and newspaper filler. Do I believe a state has the right to secede? Hmm, maybe under the right set of circumstances which I don't think exist at the moment."

John Camp: "I'd say that roughly half of the interesting people in the U.S. come from Texas. I'd include George Bush, who I found interesting: 'I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace.' Also, Kinky Friedman: 'Remember: Y'all is singular. All y'all is plural. All y'all's is plural possessive.' One of my Rules of Life was formulated while driving along I-40: 'Never order a chicken fried steak at a Holiday Inn in Amarillo, Texas.' As a new New Mexican, I'm proud to say that we threw Texans out of here on several occasions. Unlike Mike, I have met some Texans that I didn't like, but, I have to say, there weren't very many of those; they tend to be pretty likable, compared, say, to people from either major coast. What other state has an entire town devoted almost entirely to art (Marfa) or almost entirely to books (Archer City)?"

Dumbest Idea for a Photo Project Ever

Jimm Lasser and Ray Gordon, Homer's Odyssey

There have been some nice viral pictures circulating on the Web lately. Two of my recent faves are McKayla Maroney and President Obama doing McKayla's "not impressed face" (a charming photograph, I think—by Pete Souza), and Samantha Busch freaking her mother out with a picture of herself falling into the Grand Canyon. You've probably already seen them both. Everybody has, I guess.

Prize for absolute worst idea for a photo project, though, has to go to Jimm Lasser and Ray Gordon for Namesake Motors. The pictures aren't good and the puns are awful...

...But then again, here I am linking to it. And I did laugh at Carolla's Corolla. Dumb. But funny.

Looking at viral pictures is like slowing down as you pass an accident—you can't help yourself.

By the way, the first and last photographs on that site show the real namesakes for those cars.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)

The Best Cameras to Never Take Pictures With

$4,671,000 worth of Leicas

At the Westlicht camera auction earlier today, wealthy Leica collectors vied to set price records for series production cameras.

With a price of 1,680,000 Euro the legendary M3D (opening bid: 150,000 Euros) [top] owned by the LIFE photographer and Picasso intimate David Douglas Duncan is the most expensive camera from a serial production ever.

It is the second-highest price ever paid for a camera.

The gold-plated 'Luxus' Leica [lower right], dated 1929, sold for 1,020,000 Euro (opening bid: 70,000 Euro), [and] was the second most expensive camera of the auction.

The very first serial-production M3 (1953, serial number 700001) [lower left], formerly owned by Willi Stein, chief engineer of Leitz, was sold at a top price of 900,000 Euro (opening bid: 80,000 Euro).

Funny, but if I owned these they'd just sit on the shelf. Rimshot!

Mike
(Thanks to Kevin Purcell)

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

MB: "Do those prices include the lenses? What about shipping? Paypal fees? So many unanswered questions!"

Warren M: "I love my Leicas but really, whatever tells the story."

Jamie Pillers: "Haven't the buyers heard...Film Is Dead!"

The Difference Between a Photographer and an Artist

A photographer is someone who takes photographs. These days, anybody can be a photographer, and the reciprocal is also true—a photographer can be anybody. From the hottest haute-kultur gallery orchid on the planet down to somebody selling something on eBay or a real estate agent snapping pictures of an empty house with a cellphone.

We also use the term "photographer" as shorthand for "good photographer," "good" meaning skilled, practiced, experienced, interested, dedicated, or ambitious, or just hopeful. That's why some people will show you their snapshots and say self-deprecatingly, "I'm no photographer," and a guy with a big camera collection can indicate his interest by saying, "I'm a photographer." Even though the first guy sort of is and the second guy sort of isn't. The guy at the DMV who takes all the driver's license photos said to me, "I guess I'm a photographer, but I'm not a photographer." He used the same word in both senses.

It's too bad the term "artist" is so loaded, because it's a term we need. Some good photographers reject the word—David Vestal has always said that it's good enough to be called a photographer. I've always provisionally used the term "art photographer," even though I know it shares some of the drawbacks of "artist"—it's a term of disputation over status, prestige, claims to attention, claims to money, pretensions, and so forth. Too bad about all that. But it's the best term we've got.

Here's what I think: I think an art photographer is a photographer with an opinion.

An opinion about which of their photographs can truly stand as one of theirs, and about how the photograph ought to look.

A Sexton. Or actually a small JPEG approximation of a
Sexton, from an auction listing.

You have several really important controls over how you can express your opinion. The first one is to only show your best stuff; never show your sh*t. (I use the asterisk not because I'm a prude, but because certain words trigger spam filters.) I was almost offended by the huge Cartier-Bresson show originating at MoMA and curated by MoMA's Peter Galassi—I saw it in Chicago—because they were showing his sh*t. Sacrilege! They made him look bad. He would have disapproved. It was the worst argument I've ever seen for Cartier-Bresson as a great photographer. Then again, that wasn't the aim of the show.

All photographers have sh*t. Most have lots of it. The trick is never to show it.

The way I think about this is, which photographs are truly mine, in that they fully meet my idiosyncratic approval? I can go to an event and take a perfectly good record snapshot that the relatives will like, but that doesn't mean it's one of "my" pictures. I might take test shots and throw them up on this blog for illustration or discussion purposes. That doesn't mean they're "my work." I might even take a picture that excites me, that I put a lot of time and work into, but that later proves to be...nothing. (Doncha hate it when that happens?) "My" pictures are the best I can do, the ones that I love, the ones that hit the spot for me. The ones I'm proud of. The ones that fully satisfy my opinion about what one of my photographs ought to look like.

That picture from yesterday is one I took. It's also got prospects as one of my pictures, my actual work. I like it more today than I did yesterday. Time will tell.

Years ago, John Sexton was showing me some of his then-new "Places of Power" work at Photo West. I remember that when he got to one photograph he waved his hand and said, "Ah, that's nothing. That's just a snapshot." Of course he was talking about a very good workprint from a 4x5 negative, so it wasn't exactly what most people would think of as a "snapshot." What he was really saying is this. In looking at workprints of new work, we were looking at prospective Sextons. He didn't know yet which pictures would end up making the final cut: he was still in process. But he knew that one wasn't one. It wasn't a Sexton. It was another also-ran. It wasn't his work.

Never showing your sh*t is a principle that a great many photographers are violating as a matter of course these days. (I violate it too, but I have to show sh*t in the context of being a de facto teacher. To learn how the machinery works—whether actual machinery or aesthetics—you have to dismantle a lot of images, like medical students dissecting a corpse.) They throw all their stuff up on the web where anybody can see it. It's like letting people paw through your underwear drawer: that should be private. We don't want to see it. (Especially, you need to have an opinion about which shot out of a bunch of tries is the shot. I'm amazed at all the photographers who will put up nineteen versions of the same bleedin' shot on their website. What are you doing? You haven't even done the work of deciding, and you want us to care? Bah.)

The second control is getting the photograph to look like you think it ought to look. Virtually all good photographers I know, or know of, have opinions about this. They get it to look right. And they know what "right" means for them. Because they have an opinion.

The third control is putting work in the best context. Or at least a good context. For a photojournalist, that can mean putting it in the context of a set of pictures that together tell a story; for an art photographer, it might mean putting it in a gallery show where it's displayed exactly as it should be, fixed in the proper form and size, and organized and sequenced and in the company of other work that sets it off or informs it or enriches it.

Of course, 92% of all art photographers don't succeed in observing the first of these principles; 96% don't observe both of the first two; and 99.5% don't manage all three, together, with any regularity.

So don't feel too bad.

Mike

P.S. Oh, and by the way, the difference between an art photographer and a professional is that the art photographer insists on satisfying her own opinions about her work in her work. A professional defers to other peoples' opinions...usually the client's, or that of the client's representatives. There's more to it than this, but that there's the short-short version.

P.P.S. I made up the percentages in the second-to-last paragraph. They're meant to convey a general idea. Numbers mean little to me (I was one of those people who were horrible at algebra but outstanding at geometry in school), so it's always a good idea to assume numbers aren't real when I use them, except if I cite a source.

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Staffan C: "There is a lot of talk about 'art' in connection with rather everyday photography that makes me a little uneasy. It seems to me that we need at least one more category. Art for me is something that has ambitions—about depth of meaning or originality or perhaps sheer excellence—that seem out of place not only for bad photography, but for most of the good and some of the very good as well. It seems to me that the right ambition for most photographers is to be an 'artisan' rather than an 'artist'—a skilled worker, making functional objects that are also aesthetically pleasing. I photograph my family and my life, primarily for the memories. I would never think of myself as an artist, but that does not mean that I don't try to make my pictures as good as I can, according to my own taste."

Mike replies: You make a great point, but what I hear you saying is that you have a well-developed opinion about what it is you're doing and how it is you ought to do it. Maybe "art photographer" doesn't cut it for you, doesn't even have meaning within your chosen context, but that's all right—it's just a term, and the term is just a tag, and the tag doesn't matter. What matters is that you care about what you're doing and you're clear about it in your own mind—it's still what I'm trying to get at with all that stuff about "having an opinion." Even if the tag I chose here muddies rather than clarifies the waters in your case. Maybe "photographer" in the implicit sub-meaning of "good photographer" works better for you.

You know, maybe—this just occurred to me—maybe the best way to conceive of this is to consider the word "photographer" to have a series of implicit meanings...just as "photographer" sometimes means "good photographer" and sometimes "photographic craftsperson" and sometimes "photo enthusiast," might it not also sometimes mean "art photographer" or "artist" implicitly rather than explicitly?

Even in the context of photographers shown in museums (artist-photographers?) there's a huge basic categorical divide, between artists who use photography (Andy Warhol, say, or Gilbert and George) and actual practicing photographers in some more workmanlike mode who just happen to be exceptionally good at it, so good that their work transcends to art—Helen Levitt as a street photographer, Richard Avedon as a fashion photographer and portraitist. Categories just get us lost in taxonomies, anyway, like Victorian butterfly collectors.

Eric: "My friend John Wood, emeritus professor of photographic history, series editor and poet, thinks that serious photographers, with very few exceptions, are poor editors of their own work. Every such serious photographer should therefore have a trusted 'friend' who is not afraid to say what they think."

Mike replies: I have several excellent books about Daguerreotypes and one about autochromes by a John Wood—the same? [UPDATE: Yes.]

Nick M: "Good article. I'm a beginner at photography. Number of photographs I have taken so far that I'm proud of? One. And I certainly am not going to show all the duff ones to anybody else—why would they want to see them?"

Mike replies: So let's see the one!

raizans: "I bet the main reason people don't edit strongly is to see which photos get the most page views and comments."

Len Salem: "It often comes out in conversation with people I've just met that photography is important to me. This inevitably leads to the question, 'And what sort of things do you like photographing?' At one time I used, at that point, to experience a considerable sinking feeling in my stomach because I didn't know how to answer that because the question of what I photograph is a million miles away from why I photograph.

"So I developed a short answer to this question. I reply by saying that the photography that matters to me is not 'of' something but 'about' something. With the right sort of questioner this can often develop into  a discussion that is meaningful to us both without ever mentioning the word 'art' although in fact that's what in my own mind I am making, or trying to make, with the photographs that matters to me. I am in fact trying to express something personal and not something purely descriptive. For me that it as good a description of art as most."

Nicholas Condon: "There was a great moment for me about a year ago when I realized that I was the only audience for my photos that mattered. I don't need to worry about making money from my photos, so the enjoyment that I derive from making them is the only reward worth seeking. As it turns out, I enjoy making photos for myself far more than I did when I was thinking so much about the opinions of others. I doubt this makes me an artist, but it does make me a much more satisfied photographer."

Mike replies: You make me wish there were a way to hang Christmas lights on a comment.

The big irony to this is that if you really manage to do work that is true to yourself, your chances of pleasing others actually go up. Or so I believe, anyway. Although it might take a while. I think some of the most successful artists are the ones most true to themselves. No one who starts out anxious to please others above all else ends up as Rothko or Van Gogh or Thelonious Monk or Lee Friedlander. (John Camp is no doubt going to comment here, so I'll just wait to see what he says.)

John Camp says: "Sure, I've got a comment.

"I have a friend who went to college (Yale, I think) to become an artist, a painter. When I met him again many years later, it turned out he'd become quite a distinguished art historian. When I asked him about his early artistic ambitions, he said he'd discovered that 'I had the facility [to make art] but not the need.' I think exceptional artists have a powerful need to do what they do, and great artists are so focused on what they need to do that their vision changes the form itself—as with Van Gogh, Gauguin and Cezanne (and their descendants Schiele, Matisse and Picasso.) In other words, with exceptional and great artists, I don't think they do it to please themselves; I think the art is something that is virtually wrung out of their psyches. They don't 'choose' to do it, they don't do it to 'please' themselves, they do it to somehow save themselves, to justify their very existence.

"The word 'art' gets thrown around a lot, but I'll tell you what: there are damn few really exceptional artists, and at any one time, I'd suggest that there might be something between zero and five great artists working in the world. Who they are is hard to decide without the perspective of a few decades. I now suspect that Andy Warhol might have been one, but I'm still uncertain of that. There might be some great photographic artists around (living), but I don't know who they are. I haven't seen any that have struck me that way. I think Ansel Adams was one; maybe Edward Weston. I think Avedon might have been one. They actually changed the way things were seen. Who has done that recently? (Well, to answer my own question, some cinematographers. But I don't know who they are—and are they really photographers?)

"By the way, art isn't what somebody says it is. Art is its ownself."

Mike replies: Thanks for the ringing in John. Of course we're never going to settle anything here, but it's still very interesting to talk about.

Mark K Lough [not in reply to the above, n.b.]: "Yeah, yeah. As usual, among the best photo discussions anywhere. I just want to thank Mike for using a John Sexton print as an example. He is the primary one, back in the darkroom, who exemplified for me the power of putting the range dancing between just a little detail in the darkest, and just enough tone in the brightest. Look where the body of the pine left of center does not quite go black, and the edge of the birch is still there. oh, and the symphony of tones everywhere in between. Artist."

Florian Freimoser: "I like your concept of photographs that are truly yours, become yours or turn out not to be yours after a while. However, even if a photograph is really yours, it is not automatically art. I think that your third principle may be the most important. In my opinion you cannot be an artist without showing your work in a coherent context or physical form (I would say other than an online gallery) and without an audience that wants to see your work. In my opinion, artist is a term that rather describes the perception of the audience of somebody's work than a statement that anybody should make about himself. For the person who photographs, paints, composes or creates, 'artist or not' should make no difference whatsoever."

A Snap from Yesterday

Datshy Noyszewski

My brother and sister-in-law's living room is a de facto torture test for available-light shooting. The light at night is pleasant in person, but it's low in level and quite variable around the room—camera after camera that I've tested over the years has skidded up against its limitations in that room. There are reflections from a wall of windows and pools of light and dark, direct mixed with indirect lighting.

I made the usual bunch of happy holiday family snaps like this one. Datshy is my brother's sister-in-law and a longtime friend.

I think this is going to be the end of "a picture a day" for me, though. I'll throw up a snap from time to time, but pictures need to season more, for my taste. Releasing them into the world when they're too green (heh) makes it too easy to misstep.

Also, I haven't really worked out how to make these little JPEGs look good on TOP. They look a lot different here than they do on my monitor. (Is there a parallel to color management called "B&W management"? Hmm. [UPDATE: Solved now. Thanks. More on the topic anon.])

Mike

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Hugh Crawford: "There have been several mentions in the Comments of color managed browsers and calibrated monitors, etc.

"It is entirely possible to set up a workflow such that Photoshop, your browser, random other viewing software, and your printer all make the image look the same and 'correct' but the same file will look like either light mud, dark mud, or 'black-light Elvis on velvet' on most peoples' browsers. Photographers seem more likely than most users to fall into this trap by fine tuning their systems so that everything is wildly out of whack but overall the different factors compensate for each other.

"The problem is to produce sRGB profile files that look good on both the average non-color managed system and the most color managed systems.

"The solution to the above problem is left as an exercise for the reader. (Or see my other comment, in the Comments section below.)

"It's a lot easier than it used to be now that Apple has switched from gamma 1.6 to gamma 2.2. This article alone may help your problems.

"These days the only radically bad looking displays belong to longtime Mac users who have not switched to gamma 2.2 and see everything lighter than the rest of the world. If I have a client who insists that something on the web looks really washed out on their old Mac computer that they use for pre-press I send them to the local Apple store. Everybody else either cares enough to set their computer up correctly, is lucky enough that the default settings are right, or just doesn't care.

"That said, keeping setup that is tweaked to match your important client's whacked out system can save a lot in your psychopharm perscription co-pay.

"By the way, for testing your web graphics, you can't beat using the various online browser testing services like these:

http://browsershots.org/

https://browserlab.adobe.com/en-us/index.html

Black Friday and Jefferson's Dozen Canons

Jefferson's Decalogue of Canons, in his own
hand, from the Library of Congress

Benjamin Franklin, renowned for the pithiness of his sayings, wrote a whole book about virtue. The most useful modern equivalent term for the quaint word "virtue," which is no longer fashionable, might be "self-improvement." The beacons of the Enlightenment were always trying to better themselves; Franklin's Autobiography is not only an early self-help book, but also a prototype of the "how to succeed in business" genre. Thomas Jefferson, with a reputation for magisterial eloquence but not pithiness, several times wrote privately to various individuals, lastly to his progeny, putting his own advice about personal conduct into a list. The list variously had ten (the "Decalogue") or twelve items on it. The most complete and polished version of the list appears to be this one (note that I've modernized the punctuation in a couple of cases):

Thomas Jefferson's Dozen Canons of Conduct in Life

1. Never put off to tomorrow what you can do to-day.
2. Never trouble another with what you can do yourself.
3. Never spend your money before you have it.
4. Never buy a thing you do not want because it is cheap; it will be dear to you.
5. Take care of your cents: Dollars will take care of themselves.
6. Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst and cold.
7. We never repent of having eaten too little.
8. Nothing is troublesome that one does willingly.
9. How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened.
10. Take things always by their smooth handle.
11. Think as you please, and so let others, and you will have no disputes.
12. When angry, count 10 before you speak; if very angry, 100.

Sorry if you thought this post was about T3i's and 5D Mark III's—"canon" in this sense means "a secular rule, code, or law," deriving from the ecclesiastical antecedent: church councils often applied the word canon to codes of conduct or rules of church law.

Some of Jefferson's canons are familiar: several are traditional and a few derive from classical sources (Jefferson was a big reader: he donated his 6,487-volume personal library—huge for the time—to the fledgling Library of Congress after the British burned the Capitol during the War of 1812). Number nine could be better phrased for today, as something like "Worrying is wasted energy." One or two seem copped from Franklin's populist alter ego Poor Richard.

It's not a bad list. The one that might give us trouble is the counsel to "take things always by their smooth handle." It descends from Epictetus, the Greek Stoic aphorist born in the year 55, who says, "Everything has two handles, one by which it can be borne; another by which it cannot." Julian Boyd wrote in 1957 that what Jefferson meant by this canon was that political discourse should always be civil, but Jefferson never clarified his meaning, so T.J. fans have been happily arguing about it more or less ever since he wrote it.

The pseudoholiday today
"Black Friday"—which is today, as I know most Americans are all too aware—always puts me in mind of Jefferson's fourth canon. A thing is truly cheap only if you really want it and only if you will use it. Acquiring something we neither want nor need, and thus won't use, is a fool's economy, and nothing we put to constant and long-term use can really be thought of as expensive, as it repays its cost and then some. You yourself, by your actions, can make an expensive thing cheap or a cheap thing expensive.

Retailers in general love Black Friday because they believe (on good evidence) that if they can get people started on their shopping early, they'll end up spending more. It's become an important sub-holiday of Christmas, that secular high holiday of our culture's everlasting worship of Mammon.

So go forth today, but be careful. It's easy to get carried away. Remember that Black Friday isn't actually the biggest shopping day of the season, mythmaking to the contrary (usually, several of the days in the week just prior to Christmas beat it),  and it's perfectly justifiable to spend a quiet day digesting turkey and meditating further on all the things we have to be thankful for.

Mike
(Main source: monticello.org)

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

g carvajal: "American has lost the true meaning of the Christmas holiday. This is sad."

Mike replies: A gentle warning, my friend: you probably don't want to get me started! Once you push that button it can be difficult to shut me up.

However, apropos of yesterday, I will say that none of the Pilgrims would have celebrated Christmas. Being devoted Christians, they considered it a pagan holiday, an indulgence, and immoral. I can't tell you the time period when Christmas began to be acceptable in America, but it wasn't in Puritan New England in the 17th century.

Ed Grossman: "Is anybody else taken by the irony of Black Friday being the day after Thanksgiving? One day of contented thankfulness followed by something very different. To be honest, I think that our 'simple and useful holiday' (well put, Mike) is being clouded by it's calendar neighbor. Quoting Charlie Brown: 'Good Grief!'"

Dave: "It's so fun and easy to point out the hypocrisies of our founding fathers...'Never spend your money before you have it.' After his death, Jefferson's family had to sell Monticello to pay down the debts he left behind. 'Nothing is troublesome that one does willingly.' I wonder how Jefferson's slaves would feel about that one."